As we are about to celebrate Pesach, I want to think about a word I associate with the High Holidays. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when we repent for our sins and mistakes in the last year, we have a confession called the vidui that uses every letter of the Hebrew alphabet to name a sin or a fault. When the English translators wanted to duplicate this Hebrew acrostic, they did not know what to do with the letter “x”, which does not exist in Hebrew, so they came up with Xenophobia, which is fear of the strange and the alien, fear of the other. At first, people I know mocked this translation, but they don’t mock it any more.

Xenophobia isn’t a joke. There is nothing funny aboutfear of the stranger, or ignorance about people who aredifferent from you, or hatred of the stranger.

In fact, what we’ve learned about our country in theselast couple of years is just how xenophobic many peoplein our country are. We’re all immigrants to America,even the Native Americans came from Asia, but somehow,certain stripes of immigrants look down on otherstripes. Anyone who’s different from some arbitrary “us”is an arbitrary “them.”

A recent Bar Mitzvah, David Garsten, saw a book in myoffice called Xenocide, a science fiction novel by the famouswriter Orson Scott Card. It’s the third book in a seriesthat began with the science fiction classic Ender’s Game.These books explore many ideas and themes, one ofwhich is how different species interact. In Ender’s Game,the genius child Ender thinks he is playing a simulation game, but he destroys a species and its civilization. Thisevokes not only guilt but also a deep reflection on therelationship between species. Ender takes the one survivorof his unintentional extinction, the Hive Queen of thesealiens, to a new planet where he hopes she can start thespecies again. On this planet are two other species, onehuman, and one smaller human species that look like across between humans and pigs and are referred to as“piggies.” These piggies have a complicated growth processthat requires a special virus that could spell death to theregular human species.

After I gave a sermon several weeks ago about democracyand immigration, David reminded me about an interestingpassage in Xenocide where Ender’s sister Valentine, whois so brilliant that her ideas change history, comes upwith a grid of how one species relates to another. Shecalls the grid a “hierarchy of foreignness.” First, thereare human strangers from our own world. Then, thereare human strangers who live on another world. Then,there are strangers of another species, who are capable ofcommunication with us and capable of co-existence withhumanity. So the Hive Queen and the Pig/humans fitthis category. Finally, there are alien life forms that cannotbe communicated with and threaten to destroy all ofhumanity and every other species as well. In the book,the virus that helps the “piggies” grow but is dangerous to humans cannot be communicated with and cannot beunderstood. The Starship Fleet is coming to destroy thisvirus but in the process will destroy the other species onthe planet, including the pig/humans and the HiveQueen.

I want to focus on the hierarchy of foreignness. It feelsvery much like the laws of the Torah that, over and overagain, teach us how we should treat people who aredifferent from us. If there is one sentence that appearsmore than any other in the Hebrew Bible, it is: Rememberthat you were strangers in the land of Egypt. The wordger means stranger. Moses names his firstborn sonGershom, because he is a “stranger in a strange land,”the title, by the way, of another classic science fictionnovel. G-d commands us: Don’t forget what it means tobe a stranger, to be discriminated against, to be oppressed,to be persecuted, to be on the lowest rung of the hierarchy.

Jewish people know deep in their psyches what it meansto be considered a different species that is deemed so dangerous that we must be exterminated like a diseasecarryingvirus.

And so Jewish people care about the ger, the alien, andthe ger toshav, the stranger that lives among us. And asthe victims of xenocide, genocide because others thoughtwe were strange, we cannot bear it when anyone is -considered less human than anyone else. We really believethat everyone, every single human being, is created inthe image of G-d. Everyone is equal.

It sounds so basic, so simple. And yet, we are engaged inmajor legal and political and historical conflicts to fightagainst those who see human beings who are differentfrom them as alien, as if they were viruses from otherplanets. There is genocide going on right now in differentplaces on the globe. And xenophobia is all around us,expressed as various forms of racism.

We don’t live on a planet in outer space. We live here. It’sour task to counter xenophobia with kindness and xenocidewith action. We don’t live on other planets and we are notin relationships with other species. And yet, the insightsfrom science fiction can help us to apply the principlesand ideals of Biblical law in our own time and space.

On this Passover, as we eat the Matzah, the bread ofaffliction, and the bitter herbs, let’s remember what it’slike to be a stranger in a strange land and act accordingly.